Mango Mania!

Its mango season, yo. Such a great way to celebrate the first day of spring! The big red and green mangoes are alright but my favorites (the ones I wait all year for because they're still blessedly seasonal) are the little, golden ataulfo mangoes. I buy them by the case and A balances them in long lines on all our shelves and windowsills, an ever-ripening  line.  Then one day the first one is ripe and they begin to pile down on us ripely ,we eat them end to end, slicing off the two cheeks and then gnawing all of the leftover flesh from the large seed in the middle.

I have many plans. There will be cardamom lassis, broiled mango halves a silken mango pudding and a saffron colored mango salsa over wild salmon. YUM.

The ataulfo mango is different from the standard mango on a couple of points. If selected properly they are sweeter, the color is richer and so is the depth of flavor. You get none of the stringy fiber in your teeth with these babies, the flesh is soft and melty, no ropy bits to be found. The pit is also more slender so even though the fruits are smaller the proportion of meat to seed is greater.

Having a naturalist in the house is contagious. We were eating one over breakfast one minute and the next thing I knew we were dissecting the seed and examining the embryonic sprout end vs the stem end and letting the boys touch the papery brown skin. Its living on the window sill now in a tiny metal pot of water. Google tells me I have good odds of growing a mango tree! I'm for that.

 Must be time to buy another case.

That Glorious First Snow

One week ago we had our first snowfall. Last year was a very light winter, but we did get one big "winter" storm at Halloween...the year before that was of course a real doozy for us New Englanders with record amounts of snowfall. All of us out here are oh, so curious about what in the world this winter holds for us. I enjoy the light snow version for ease of use but I do appreciate a hard killing cold for the sake of bugs and the fluffy downpour for the sake of my house full of snow bunnies.

The boys were out of their skins over the snow last week. I basically gave up any hope of structured lesson time and let them have free-reign outdoors. They played outside until their fingers were numb and then came sobbing indoors just like I used to as a little girl...shaking all their fuchsia appendages while I rubbed them warm again by the radiator.....then back out again with soaking wet mittens before I could stop them. They made a giant snowball together, pulled out the sleds for a test run and threw snowballs at each other until they were all exhausted.

I know the snow will be back again and winter will come for real eventually whether real accumulation comes with it or not but there is something special about that first snowfall, isn't there? I love when it happens in daylight and we can all rush to the windows and shout and holler while we watch the flakes start falling and I also love it when it happens overnight and we wake up to a world newly sparkly and white like there were visits from snow fairies while we slept.

When I was a girl we often made snow ice cream with one of the first snow falls. I totally forgot this time around but I am all ready for next time with this childhood experiment. I think the boys will flip. I've never made anything with snow before and I have a feeling they'll be begging for it every time there's any white stuff on the ground. Ice cream is well-loved at our house. Traditionally snow ice cream is made with sugar and milk but I think this year I'll try a version sweetened with maple syrup and mixed with heavy cream for the real deal experience.

 For those new to this dish, go see Angela's wonderful recipe and directions over at her really great blog Salt of the Earth Urban Farm. I super-dig this blog about urban/farming living and homeschooling in the delightful city of Portland. Inspiration by the bucketful!

Strawberry Mama

The strawberries are ripe. We're eating them at every meal now after our big trip the u-pick farm. We always mean to look further afield and one year we went to our CSA's organic field for them but we usually end up at Jones Farm like we did this year. The taste of a field-ripe strawberry is cliche but it still has to be remembered every single year that they are so, so, so much better than the ones we buy in the grocery store all winter to tide ourselves over.

Yesterday I finished putting the last of the jars of freezer jam into the freezer. A joined us around the dining room table this year and helped mash berries and boil pectin with the boys and I. Said he truly had no idea there was exactly that much sugar in jam. Heh. Now you know why I substitute that low-sugar pectin stuff that I buy at Whole Foods, eh buddy?

It does make me feel good to have him start noticing how much sugar is in a given food, not just have me be the food-nazi around the house, always on everyone's case about "feeding the children good things." Nobody likes to be the lone policeman. To be fair though, despite my very wholesome nutritional training there was a time when I was in his shoes, not paying much attention to what went into the jam.

Once as a teen I made jam(one of my favorite summer activities) with one of my best chums whose mom was a devoted naturist hippie type, committed to real foods and the avoidance of processed goods. We'd been out picking wild strawberries together which was all very idyllic and then ended the day in my parents kitchen, with everything we'd picked, intent on making them into jam. My friend balked at the amount of sugar in the recipe and told me that her mom would never go for that....and asked me if we could possibly substitute a smaller amount of honey or fruit juice or even skip the sweetener all together. At the time I didn't exactly get it but here I am, mama of my own domain and retroactively impressed by my friend's scruples and I kinda wish we'd just eaten those little berries raw and fresh instead of boiling the daylights out of them with a wagon load of sugar on top. I hope my own little boys learn the same standards my friend espoused, even when her mom wasn't watching. That's what Pamona's Universal Pectin is all about I guess....at least as far as jam is concerned.

So, there is jam, and there are plenty of "leftover" fresh berries and last night there was even a pie. And for breakfast tomorrow, I'm going to have some strawberries in cream...just a little maple syrup drizzled on top to keep it on the straight and narrow. You haven't lived until you've eaten fresh berries in cream.

Related articles

• Small Batch Recipe: Strawberry Thyme Jam Urban Preserving with Marisa McClellan

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• Day 112 - A Strawberry Workday and Strawberry Fruit Leather

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• Berry Resource: Uses for Strawberries

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• Homemade Strawberry Freezer Jam

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Sundried Tomatoes, Sans-Sun

It's tomato season...we're rolling in them. I am to the stage where I have started packing a small container of tomatoes to take with us when we leave...just in case any of our friends want tomatoes. (Yay friends!) Almost time for making tomato sauce. I'd be all over it this week except we're wildly busy with Vacation Bible School at church every single day so, all other major accomplishments (hello Laundry!) are out for a while. Next week will be sauce week, and our counter will be splashed with tomato seeds, and we'll have tomato skins dropped all over the kitchen floor and the house will smell like tangy, sweet sauce for days on end, long after the jars are sealed and rinsed and making their way to the pantry shelves.

 But, I just couldn't wait to do something with tomatoes...they beg to be used, and loved and enjoyed. So, I decided to try making my own "sundried" tomatoes. It's been raining this week and the heat is finally down a bit so I decided to skip doing it outdoors (maybe another year) and just do it simply, in my oven.

Now, this week is insanity at our house so low key was really important if I was going to be working on anything at all. Is tomato sauce intimidating but you'd like to dip your toe in the water of food preservation and old fashioned home-making skills? Dry a few tomatoes. They're dead easy and so luscious good.

 I took some really beautiful plum tomatoes (from the Farmer's Market, not our garden) and sliced them in half. I laid them on a cake rack, to give them good air circulation, set it in a cookie sheet....and popped the whole shooting match into my oven on the lowest setting which on my oven is 150 degrees Farenheit.

They slowly, slowly wrinkle and darken and after a day or so, depending on the humidity, the moisture content of the tomatoes, the heat level of your lowest oven setting...etc. they'll be done! I rotated the cookie sheet around in a circle sometimes to make sure they dried evenly, and towards the end I checked more frequently so that I could start picking finished tomatoes off the sheet as they started to stagger towards done. I turned my oven off at night just because that's a long time of unsupervised cooking and I worried they'd finish somewhere around 3AM and then keep toasting away till I woke up and found them sadly dark and hard. When they're finished they're this sumptuous lipstick red, beautiful, just teetering on the edge of burgundy. And the flavor has intensified to a wonderfully  deep, zippy sweet...almost like fruit leather.

You know they're done when they feel like nice flexible, leathery dried fruit....nothing gushy left to them. I am keeping these in a ziploc bag in the fridge at the moment but next week...when all that tomato canning happens, I'm planning to take them up to the next level and try making this amazing looking tomato confit with them....slobber slobber slobber! I forgot to pick up a couple of heads of garlic at the Farmer's Market today but otherwise I have all of the ingredients ready and waiting...it's just a matter of time.

Cook Ahead Cape Cod

It is high summer and we are headed to Cape Cod for a small weekend away, (Ah, blissful place!) but we're also looking to save money. (Haha! On Cape Cod!) We have a motel room with a little refrigerator and a microwave, should something need re-heating, and I'm planning to do all the ahead cooking I can to save the restaurant bills and snacking stops one inevitably makes on these trips.

I want to be like Ma Ingalls, Mrs. Appleyard the Gilbreth Family...women in days of yore when they never left on a trip without a bursting hamper, full of all manner of good things for munching. That has to be doable, right?

I need ideas! What can I make ahead and pack in our cooler and then serve my family between dips in the sea? So far I've thought of:

• Peach turnovers (we picked peaches this past weekend and THEN got peaches from our CSA)
• Hard boiled eggs
• A wedge of nice cheese
• Carrot sticks
• Peanut butter and honey sandwiches, sliced in little squares for snack or meals for little hands.
• Steamed green beans from our garden, tossed with a little soy sauce
• (your idea here)
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• (your idea here)

So, what ya'll got? Throw me a brainstorm! I'm waiting, in my kitchen, wooden spoon in hand!

New CSA

We're a good bit of the way through the harvesting season with our new CSA and I have to say that I like it. It is just as handy as I imagined to have our pick-up location down the street, instead of 45 minutes away, and kind of fun to meet neighbors there who also happen to have a share. I didn't count on the community interaction bit, kind of a fun bonus.

I do miss going up to an actual farm. It was a great built-in break that we had going and I feel like we've removed ourselves a little bit from the food-land connection. There was one scheduled members day when our new CSA invited everyone to come up for a picnic and help pull garlic and then go for a dip in the creek. Have to make sure to plan on going next year. I am an organization klutz and through a lot of fumbling we managed to miss it this time around. Am still kicking myself  although this morning I found out there is a special autumn farm festival scheduled for September when we can maybe make up the difference! Hooray!

Since there's such a small actual farm connection to speak of via our CSA this year, I find that I'm seeking out chances to go to drive out to the country for other things: caterpillar hunting, listening to the frogs sing, rural estate sales, buying farm milk, picking up local meat...etc. Kind of fun to mix it up anyhow.

So, the time savings is great, the produce is great, the community connection is fun and over-all I think we made a fine trade. You never quite know when you make this kind of a gamble and switch everything up, but this time it worked out.

Tomato Stars

These shining beauties were the first tomatoes off our vines this year. Am a big fan of the orange streaks and stripes. It still takes my breath away to pluck something out of the yard and take it straight to the table for dinner, there's a really deep empowerment to the process, somehow being part of something deep and mystically sacred, much bigger than you, but paradoxically also something you did by the sweat of your own brow. I get fairly drunk on it all.